Teaching About U.S. Government and the Constitution
In Texas, U.S. History courses in 5th and 8th grade include a unit on the U.S. Constitution. Since I began my teaching career teaching Government to High School seniors, I have a lot of ideas on this topic. It has been really fun for me to synthesize these complex principles into a format that is easily understandable and fun for younger students. In this post I will share a powerpoint and some strategies that I created for my districts’ 8th graders on the Articles of Confederation. I will also explain a very simple strategy using play dough for explaining the principles of the U.S. Constitution to younger students-even though my AP High Schoolers thought it was fun,too.
Articles of Confederation
In our history course we explain that America’s first form of government after Independence was the Articles of Confederation. Whether your course goes into depth about it or not, we all generally emphasize its weaknesses and explain how it led to writing the U.S. Constitution. One of my favorite strategies for the Explain portion of the 5E Lesson Model (click here for my ideas on how to use the 5E model of instruction) is the interactive lecture. It is a combination of lecture, discussion, visuals and activities. As mentioned previously, I created a powerpoint about the Articles of Confederation to use when teaching the fundamentals of the Articles which you may download if you like. Lesson and activity notes are included in the notes section. There are some terrific graphic organizers and cartoons that do an awesome job of clarifying some of the principles, but I apologize because I have no idea where I collected them from over the years. Most came from old tranparencies. For this reason I cannot copy them here, but they are in the powerpoint. I did, however create the following activity myself, so I thought I would share it in this post.
Five Finger Notes
I begin by explaining that the Articles of Confederation had 5 major weaknesses and that by the end of the class students will be able to easily list and explain them as they count them on their fingers. Then I have students trace their hand onto their paper. This can be the graphic organizer for their notes.
Ask students to look at their pinkie finger. Ask what observation they can make about it in relation to their other fingers. Students will undoubtedly comment that it is the smallest or weakest. At that point you can explain that one of the biggest problems with the Articles was that they were too weak. Since the pinkie will represent the weakness of the Articles, have students write this on their copy of their pinkie. The new nation faced many challenges and this government was not given enough power to meet them. You may want to have students add these details to their notes or just explain them. You may also want to discuss the reasons why the Articles were created purposely weak.
They could not tax and therefore had no money.
They had a legislature to make laws, but no executive to enforce them
Next have the students draw a ring on their copy of their ring finger. Explain that the ring finger usually wears the gold so it will represent economic problems. Here are some of the economic problems the new nation faced. You may have students add them if you like, or just explain them.
War debt of $160 million (some to other countries, some to U.S. citizens through war bonds)
Inflation (too much money was printed during war- now not valuable so it doesn’t buy much)
Every state printed its own money which made trade difficult.
Post war depression because Britain was selling their products too cheaply ; competition hurt U.S. business (Robert Morris proposed an import tariff, but couldn’t get all 13 states to agree)
Kids love it when you get to the middle finger. Ask them to tell you, without using profanity, what it usually means when someone points the middle finger at someone else. Explain that yes, it represents that someone is angry. Who was angry? Demonstrate that this middle finger is crowded between two other fingers which can represent other states. The middle finger can remind us of boundary disputes between the states. The states argued over territory won from Britain (though this was finally somewhat resolved with the passage of the North West and Land Ordinances).
Next wag your index or pointer finger into a student’s face. Ask students under what circumstances do people typically use this body language. They are likely to respond that people wag their finger at someone while they are arguing. Explain that our index finger, or pointer, will represent Arguments between states over trade. States were taxing each other’s products. The new U.S. government was not given the power to regulate trade between the states which hurt the economy even more.
The symbolism for the thumb is a bit of a stretch, but bear with me. Ask students if they ever played thumb war. You can even have a pair of students demonstrate for fun. What is the object of the game? Ultimately it is to show your power isn’t it? The U.S. was a brand new little nation, but if we looked too weak to other countries we would have no respect from them. Our thumb will represent lack of respect from other nations. Following are some examples:
Treaty violations- Britain gave us western territory in the Treaty of Paris, but their forts and soldiers remained, they stirred up Indians against frontier settlers.
Spain was interfering with our right of deposit (use of Miss. R. and port of New Orleans)
Even our allies were becoming distrustful due to our poor credit since we couldn’t repay the war debt.
Barbary pirates attacked our ships in Mediterranean
After you have recapped the 5 weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation by counting them off on your 5 fingers clench your fingers into a fist and explain that these problems came to a head during Shays Rebellion. The clenched fist represents the confrontation. You may want to explain about Shays Rebellion in more detail and have students add this to their notes. After Shay’s Rebellion our founding fathers realized that changes needed to be made so they held a convention in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation. They ended up writing a whole new Constitution.
Teaching About the Constitutional Convention
Constitutional Convention Reader’s Theatre
My favorite way to teach about the Constitutional Convention is through performing a play or reader’s theatre that emphasizes the compromises that were made. I used a wonderful one called The U.S. Constitution: A Bundle of Compromises, in which the large vs. small states delegates debate the Great Compromise, and Northern vs. Southern state’s delegates debate the Three-fifths Compromise. I asked students to complete a chart showing each issue and compromise as the play progressed. The bad news is that I only have hard copies of this play and couldn’t find it on-line for you. The good news is that I found one that is very similar. You can find it here.
Teaching About the Principles of American Government
Using Play Dough to Teach the Principles of Government and the Constitution
Kids love manipulatives, and they are terrific teaching tools to make abstract ideas understandable for students, so why should they be limited to math and science classrooms? The principles of the U.S. Constitution are certainly essential abstract ideas that our students must understand, so why not teach them with manipulatives? And what is more manipulative than play dough? Below is a sample scriptdemonstrating how I do this. Of course you will want to add higher order questions along the way and modify it for your students level of understanding and how in-depth you wish to go.
Show students a ball of play dough or clay.The Constitution is basically a guide to how the U.S. distributes power so the ball of play dough represents power. Briefly discuss the purpose of government and the social contract theory. Hand each student a pinch of the play dough. Every individual has a certain amount of power. Some individuals had more power than others and were able to take advantage of those who were weaker, so for the good of society people willingly gave up a portion of their power to create government. Collect a portion of play dough from each individual.
Show the ball of “power” that you collected to represent the government. Compare it to the amount the individuals retain by smashing it onto the much smaller play dough ball held by a student. Unfortunately what often happened was that the government ended up with so much power that it became a dictatorship or absolute monarchy that abused the people who gave it to them. This was called tyranny. The patriots believed that Great Britain’s government did this to the colonies so they rebelled and were determined to create a limited government so that their government couldn’t become too powerful.
How would they do this? First they created the Articles of Confederation which was based on the principle of federalism. Instead of giving all of the power to a central government, the individuals gave their power to their state. Since there were initially 13 states, the power was divided into 13 pieces. Divide the government ball of power into 13 pieces. You could hand a piece of the clay to 13 students to represent each state.Under the Articles, the states then gave a portion of their power to the central government. Receive a portion back from each “state” for the central government and show the new “power” ball. This cuts the power of government down considerably doesn’t it? But as we learned, that didn’t leave enough power for the central government to do what was necessary to solve the problems of the nation. So what did the people decide to do? They replaced the Articles of Confederation with the U.S. Constitution. Under the Constitution they kept the principal of Federalism but they re-divided the power. They gave more delegated powers to the central government, now called the federal government, but still reserved powers to the states. Re-divide the clay giving more to the federal government and put the state power away.
Many people were worried that the stronger federal government would become abusive like Great Britain, so they wanted to add more safeguards. They separated the federal government into three branches: the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. This principle is called separation of powers. Separate the Federal government’s power ball into three balls. And to make sure that none of the branches became too powerful, they set up a system of checks and balances so each branch can check up on and limit the power of the others. (Give examples, showing a graphic organizer if you wish.)
Another way America limits the power of government is by allowing citizens to vote on representatives to make and enforce laws. The right to vote is called popular sovereignty. This principle makes the U.S. a democracy. Choosing representatives makes ours a representative government- which is also called republicanism. Even with all of these safeguards, some people still wanted to add more protection of individual rights into the Constitution, so they added The Bill of Rights as the first 10 Amendments.
I usually have students complete a graphic organizer and/or define the terms during the discussion, or afterwards using their notes. These terms are also a good time to use the —strategy. See here for my teacher’s toolbox of strategies.
I would love to hear your favorite strategies for teaching about U.S. government and the Constitution if you would like to share with my readers. I would also love to hear back about how these strategies worked for you with your students if you would be willing to leave a comment below.
